Top Ten Joomla SEO Improvements

I read all you have to say on SEO - thanks so much. Wanted to add more options to your top 10 list, in case these ideas are also helpful.

10. I believe you have a template that is helpful - you should go ahead and share that link to Bolt! http://www.alledia.com/store/l...Templates/

9. Also recommend Ercan's Page Title plugin http://ercan.us/extensions/title-manager.html It does change the value used in Google search results, as well as the Page name, too.

7. For those who use template overrides, good time to follow through on the H1. http://developer.joomla.org/tu...oomla.html

6. Another approach to Custom error pages http://docs.joomla.org/Custom_error_pages

5. Another option is to use the Robots tag with the Article to get the follow/no follow effect.

3. Also, if you fill in the Meta Description on the Article, Joomla! overrides the global.

2. Just to add - permanent URLs are possible w J! core but you have to make certain not to create multiple paths to the same Article (unless you use Alias or External URL menu types.) I know for many it seems difficult to do, though.

Thanks for this Steve!

Woah! Top resource - thank you.

Echo that. Keep this up and this will be THE place to come to learn.

I love this site.
Steve, Amy ... your input is very valuable.

Great links.

Marc

Great site, great blog, its one of my top Joomla reads. I agree with most of the suggestions here, and will link to this article :)

Is their an Expert here who can answers this question:

Joomla 1.5x vs WordPress, both well equiped with SEO tools... The question is: Which one will do a better job in regards of Google rank and other search engine?

@ Erik

Wordpress out of the box is more equipped to address the ranking and search engine hemisphere. For joomla , even 1.5 it is a little distant in achieving so. When you add plugins to both, the gap is narrowed to a big extent, so much so that if properly optimized joomla can give as good results.

However google likes content and content ( relevant and intere
sting) alone is the one responsible for getting high google ranks.

Thank you Steve and Amy for valuable inputs to the raging debate.

Thank you for sharing! I'm quite a newbee to Joomla, and I feel lucky to have found this site with great advice! The more I learn about Joomla, the more I see that I don't know enough!

Best regards,
Queen

To Rahul

Your answer to Eric is good. But I must admit as a SEO worker that I saw Wordpress gave fast and much better result in ranking than Joomla. Exemple : the page created for a tag or a category in Wordpress obtained a good ranking (before indexation or backlink creation) long time before Joomla one's. Of course is easy for me to see this because some of my customers have a Joomla website for certains purpose and a wordpress blog for other with the same root domain.So I can compare the result in the same niche and keyword fields. This is not to say to use wordpress insteand of Joomla. Each on them have advantages for certains kind of Web Goals. Hope that you undersant my english. A Quebec french SEO and lover fo Joomla and Wordpress.
Seccus

Thanks a lot for this valuable aticle.

All of these are great tips and are well.. the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Joomla SEO. Rahul hit the proverbial nail on the head. Quality content is what get's you ranked at the top and keeps you there.

What I don't like about the SEF products is they become a real pain to manage over time especially if you have a LOT of pages. Here's another thing that can harm but not tank rankings.

Say you upgraded to one of the newer SEF components from a prior one or you change a setting that alters the SEF URL (i.e. no longer shows section, just cat/url) and you have to clean the SEF cache. Next time google indexes your site, you can have 100's or 1000's of broken google cached links.

For now, I have deinstalled SH404SEF from my site and customers site and go with the Joomla core SEF product due to this. This one change alone has saved me hours of work trying to clean broken link messes up because optimally, you want to have a 301 from the old broken cached links to the new ones to keep google clean.

Who has time for that? Content.. that in my experience is what gets you ranked and keeps you there. Blogs especially with quality content.

Thoughts?

Hello everyone,

I'm the person that ask about this in the first place and here my conclusion. If you need to create a simple website with a lot of content but with a few menus only, the kind of website that does NOT need special functionality such as a directory of member, a directory of document, private section where you have to pay to access and/or a website with a cart integrated or forum… GO WITH WORDPRESS.

If you need these functionality, go with Joomla 1.5x and install the following component; ARTIO JoomSEF v3.2.9 with all the necessary extensions, JTags and SEF Service Map. Set-up this way, with the basic configuration, you should have a pretty much easy to manage and to refer to search engine. Simply don’t forget to produce a lot of content because, as you already know, Search engine have a dependency to content.

Still have budget/Time/effort to spend?
Install WordPress in a sub domain: www.wordpress.mysiteweb.com as an example. Make this Blog look like your main site. Blog a lot and don’t forget to put teaser of each of your blog article in the FrontPage of the main site. This way you create a second point of entry. The main site refers the blog and the blog refer the main site and that my friend is call pertinence. Get to that point and the cyber world is your.

Thanks to everyone who participate to this debate.

Thanks a lot the ideas and information helped me in doing our new site.

Joomla is a new concept to some publishers. But this kind of content will help these publishers understand what Joomla is and how Joomla can help

I don't know WHO wrote this article, since there is no name for the author. Probably everyone else here knows. It was a good article. Thank you for posting it.

Let me add that this idea of quality content is full of BS. Who decides what is quality and what isn't? You would have to be an expert in EVERYTHING to decide it for the entire virtual universe. If you know about Celestial Mechanics, then you can judge whether the content of such a page is quality or malarkey. If you don't know then you cannot judge, no matter how obscure and intellectual the piece sounds.

For example, I might write about the two magnetic fields of a star, core and envelope and that they hypothetically are either aligned parallel or perpendicularly. This strong division plays itself out in the physical and measurable characteristics of the stars. So one could classify all stars into two broad camps, corresponding to the duality of magnetic field alignment. Maybe to you it sounds like it is not so convincing, especially since you expect far more complicated ways of dealing with the manifestations of hidden features in nature. So you would say it was an unworthy page of writing. However, this is a real theory and approach to the problem posed and pursued by Dr. Goode at the University of Arizona, with whom I discussed these matters.

It does not have to be something so heady either. You may think denial of the holocaust is unworthy, but it is a growing trend among ultra-liberals and countries that have been aligning themselves with Iran. Should the writing of this viewpoint be deemed unworthy?

So there are inherent limitations in this idea being passed off as gold. Certainly we want everything on the Internet to be worthy, but everything cannot be worthy to everyone. That is why this ultimately is an encroachment on freedom of speech. Google is undermining or freedom to be heard by burying what it deems unworthy.

@R. Craig

Google is not a sensor nor is it a threat to free speech. Content gets naturally censored due to the sheer volume of information on the internet, not through control of say Google, other search engines or the government.

Society has changed and our ability communicate (channels/outlets) has changed. No longer are we limited to print media (which really was a point of censorship and free speech at one time) to get our thoughts, opinions, etc. out. We have total freedom to publish what we want and the Google's, Yahoo, MSN's, etc. algorithyms do the rest.

That's not limiting free speech or some form of censorship, it's just sheer volume of info regardless of it's accuracy. The SE's do try to build sophisticated algorithms to deal with relevancy and they are doing pretty well consider the crap on the net.

I would ask that you consider this before condemning a company not involved in true subterfuge.

Regards,
Eric
Web-JIVE.com